Workers of the world

Today being International Labor Day, I’m going to tell you about a recent experience trying to get a logo designed for an organization I’m helping out.

It’s a really great group, dedicated to helping the unemployed find jobs by connecting them with people who know people in companies all over the Bay Area. I volunteered to be product manager and to lead the revamping of their website, because—although they call their connections concept Networking 3.0—their website harkens back to Web 0.5.

Maybe even Web 0.25.

I won’t even tell you their URL. It’s that bad.

(The current functionality isn’t much better, either, although the executive director keeps referring to the features as “apps”. They’re not “apps”; they’re lists of members, of companies and jobs, with some links you can click on.)

But I digress.

As part of actually making this outfit look what I call “web real”—like a viable, professional entity that has both gravitas and technological credibility—I created a full-on design specification, with positioning, organizational background, use cases, etc. I also finally persuaded the ED that we need a logo. We can’t get the site actually designed & built until we have some sort of brand around which to, you know, design it.

This being a non-profit, our original email blast for a pro bono designer didn’t net anyone. And we have two events to attend this weekend, so the production of a logo became a priority. The ED therefore opened an account on elance, posted an excerpt from my design spec and then handed it over to me to deal with.

Within 12 hours we had 16 proposals, and here’s where the issue of international labor came in.

I already had issues with the idea of crowdsourcing, because it essentially reduces every commission to a freefall to the lowest bid. For a while I was part of Guru, a similar site; but I realized that if I put forth a bid that was fair compensation for the talent and level of expertise I bring to the job, I’d always be underbid.  I wasn’t being outrageous, either; I was estimating the amount of time a job would take and what I would get if I worked at an agency to do it.

Sites like these pit creative vendors against competitors in third-world countries who will always underbid. And for many, many “clients”, getting something for next-to-nothing is the most important consideration. (Like people buying air travel tickets who’ll go with the carrier that’s $5 less. The result being that airlines compete for the lowest airfare and the lousiest service. Or the entire Wal-Mart business model.)

Keep in mind that, by my estimate, designing a logo will take a minimum of four hours of work: absorbing what the client’s business is all about, their market, their ethos, their competitors, etc., developing appropriate colors (in our case, since we don’t already have them), designing several possibilities; getting client feedback; editing the designs; and finalizing. It took me eight hours to go through the 16 vendors’ listings, look at the work they’ve done before, start sifting them out and supplying the winners with information about our organization.

We got bids from designers in the US, Pakistan, Mexico, Yemen, Colombia, Argentina, Trinidad/Tobago, Bulgaria and the UK. The highest was $383.56; the lowest, $45.

This is our global economy in a nutshell—corporations are doing this on a grand scale, offshoring jobs (and tax payments) to places where they can pay workers a pittance and not worry their heads about safe working conditions and extraneous stuff like that. And I was essentially being asked to participate in this in a very personal way.

Made me very, very uneasy. And not just because on something like this I prefer to sit down across a table from someone to tell the story and answer questions.

In the end, I chose two designers, one with a bid of $170 and the other at $80. Both from the USA. I filled out detailed questionnaires about our organization Friday morning; both replied that they had enough information to produce designs. I’ll get initial output from one today, from the other tomorrow.

I worry, though. I worry that without the actual human contact (not even a phone call—strenglich verboten in the elance model) my questionnaire answers don’t give the full idea of what this organization does so it can be represented in a logo. I worry that I’ve helped support a system that turns everything into a sweatshop. I worry that I’ll get useless designs back and we won’t have anything for the two job fairs this weekend—so I’ll have a crappy web site and no logo to give job seekers any confidence in our ability to help them.

I worry that the Internet, instead of opening real opportunity, just reduces everything to the lowest common denominator.